Addressing threats to health care's core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power. Advocating for accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in leadership and governance of health care.

Monday, March 16, 2015

An ironically titled session by ECRI Institute: "Would You Bet Your Mother's Life on the Safety of Your EHR?"

As the healthcare industry continues toward its goal of making all
patient health records electronically accessible, a health system’s
safety increasingly is determined by the quality of its EHR
implementation.

Last November ECRI Institute, a non-profit organization that uses
scientific methods to test medical products, rated “incorrect or missing
data in electronic health records and other health IT systems” as the
No. 2 hazard that will put patients at risk in
2015.
“Once inaccurate data gets into the
electronic health record, it’s hard to get it out,” said Ronni
Solomon, executive vice president and general counsel for ECRI
Institute. “That’s a challenge, and the less detectable it is, the
higher the risk. You don’t know it’s in there.”

Such incorrect information probably has far more impact than it did on paper, I believe; computer output is often uncritically taken as gospel, and is often cut-and-pasted to newer records without patient interaction, thus propagating an error of omission, commission or data loss or corruption (due to malfunction).

The negative impact of bad data in electronic health records is both immediate and long-lasting. “In the short-run, bad data in the system limits the effectiveness of
clinical communications and the effectiveness of
decision support,” added William Marella, ECRI’s executive director, PSO operations and
analytics. “And basically it undermines people’s confidence in the system.”

Solomon and Marella will conduct an educational session at HIMSS15 in April on how healthcare organizations can apply safety science to IT and informatics to improve patient safety.

The first step they can take is to strip control of critical health IT decisions from the business-IT personnel and put heath IT under the aegis of medical leadership, especially medical leadership that contains formally-educated Medical Informatics and related professionals. (This admittedly and unfortunately has a very low chance of happening due to hospital politics and power structures.)

“Would You Bet Your Mother's Life on the Safety of Your EHR?” is
designed to help attendees create a framework for planning and
implementing IT strategies, processes and tools to increase the safety
of healthcare patients.

Both Ms. Solomon and Mr. Marella are aware of what happened to my mother. I wonder out loud if the title is based on, at least in part, that incident.

... “The promise of these systems is that they’re going to make the
health care system more efficient and ultimately more safe,” Marella
said. “Now the administrators in hospitals and health systems that have
financed these systems want a return on their investment.”

Perhaps the administrators should have done due diligence on the realities of this technology before investing the money.

The session will cover how organizations can: establish an
infrastructure for identifying and responding to patient safety
problems; assess safety challenges facing health IT users and
implementers; identify partnerships that can accelerate safety
improvements;
and analyze opportunities to use informatics to prevent
adverse events.

“What we’re trying to do in this talk is get in front of the IT
leaders of these institutions and help them understand where patient
safety people are coming from and how we can bridge these two silos
within the health system, because they will both be more
effective working together,” Marella said.

I add that all of these goals should have been met prior to a national rollout and, at each organization, prior to subjecting patients to these technologies, but I speak common sense, which in medicine is no longer common. Thus, sessions like this one in 2015.

Contact Us

Email: info at firmfound dot org
or go to the web-site for FIRM - the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine

More About FIRM and Health Care Renewal

FIRM - the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine is a 501(c)3 that researches problems with leadership and governance in health care that threaten core values, and disseminates our findings to physicians, health care researchers and policy-makers, and the public at large. FIRM advocates representative, transparent, accountable and ethical health care governance, and hopes to empower health care professionals and patients to promote better health care leadership.

FIRM depends on contributions from individuals and non-profit organizations. FIRM does not accept any direct support from for-profit health care corporations.

FIRM welcomes support from individuals and non-profit organizations. If you are interested in donating to FIRM, please email info at firmfound dot org, snail mail us at 16 Cutler St, Suite 104, Warren, RI, 02885, USA, or see our web-site.

Subscribe To Health Care Renewal

Policies: Blog Roll and Comments

Our blogroll is meant to include blogs that provide interesting content relevant to what we write. It is not an endorsement in any way of any specific blog.

We accept comments, especially from registered Blogger users. If you do not wish to register with Blogger, we will accept anonymous comments, although prefer that they contain identification of the commenter.

We encourage thoughtful comments relevant to the issues brought up by the posts on Health Care Renewal.

All comments are moderated. We will reject spam, profanity, advertising of products or services not directly related to the content of this blog.

We will reject any unsubstantiated accusations or allegations.

Nonetheless, all comments represent only the opinions of those making them. The appearance of comments does not imply endorsement by the Health Care Renewal bloggers.

Please email general comments about the blog, other concerns, or questions to info AT firmfound DOT org